Gerda Walther: mysticism, philosophy, art

Thesis

This thesis examines the work of Gerda Walther, a philosopher and mystic whose work had until very recently been almost entirely neglected. A member of the Freiburg and Munich circles of phenomenologists, Walther worked in her main published texts (Ein Beitrag zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaften (1922) and Zur Phänomenologie der Mystik (1923)) to balance the competing impulses arising out of a radically atheistic Marxist upbringing, her study of philosophy, and the onset of what she describes as mystical and telepathic experiences. Walther’s work, seen more or less as failed interventions into conventional phenomenological discourse by several of her contemporaries, has been recently reassessed by philosophers, and presented as more successful than previously thought. I undertake a reorientation of emerging scholarship on Walther in terms of a meditative-mystical tradition, and in terms of German modernist writing: examining the overlooked conditions and cultural contexts that show their workings in Walther’s texts. I argue that Walther does indeed ‘fail’ to fit the mould of an early phenomenologist, and that this ironically staged failure forms the interest of her work.

My thesis is the first study of Walther to be grounded in a language-based reading of her texts, and which takes a wider cultural approach to her work. I employ a methodology of critical close reading to make explicit the compelling implicit textual processes of Walther’s work. Throughout her work, peculiar accounts of personal experiences masquerade as the result of abstracted philosophical reflections; and artistic approaches to religious experience and social life are presented as having as much of a hold on those topics as philosophy does. Walther is asking what it means for a text to be philosophical, mystical or artistic, with work that occupies an intersection of generic traditions, and blurs these distinctions in productive and problematic ways. The set of problems she presents contributes to a new vision of the philosophical and cultural landscape in early twentieth-century Germany. I introduce Walther’s work into areas of scholarship in which she is virtually unknown, but to which she ought to be of most interest: discussions of the margins of modernist cultural life and writing; and philosophical scholarship which questions the grounds of its investigations.

Authors: Burns, NE

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: social ontology; mysticism; modernism; phenomenology
• Subjects: Modernism; Mysticism; Philosophy; German literature; Poetry